Lachlan Jackson

Lachlan Jackson, PhD
Status: 2010 ALMA winner
Location: Kyoto, Japan

Originally from Melbourne, Australia, Lachlan is a former Japanese language high school teacher. He currently teaches English in the Faculty of Law, Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto. Lachlan is a linguistically intermarried father. Struggling with the challenge of raising his own two children bilingually, he found many explanations about how to raise children in two (or more) languages in both the popular and academic literatures seemingly simplistic and naive. Consequently, it was his initial curiosity and confusion – mixed with a healthy dose of scepticism – that provided Lachlan with the initial impetus to undertake his doctoral work on bilingual child-rearing.

Lachlan’s recently submitted his PhD thesis, entitled Bilingual Child-rearing in Linguistic Intermarriage: Negotiating Language, Power, and Identities between English-Speaking Fathers and Japanese-Speaking Mothers in Japan to the University of Queensland’s School of Languages and Comparative Cultural Studies. This qualitative sociolinguistic study focused on minority language-speaking fathers’ experiences of bilingual child-rearing – a perspective that has, to date, been inadequately theorized in the existing literature. Through the incorporation of questionnaire, logbook, and in-depth interview data, his doctoral work presents eight unique and richly nuanced cases of language contact in the family domain.

Lachlan’s research interests include issues pertaining to bilingualism and bilingual child-rearing, linguistic intermarriage, discourses of ‘Japaneseness’, as well as cultural and linguistic diversity in Japan. As a long-term resident of Japan, Lachlan spends far too much time following the trials and tribulations of his beloved Collingwood Football Club over the internet.

Read Lachlan’s award winning essay here.

A year on, and read Lachlan’s reflections on the ALMA award here.